FOG Design+Art: Alma Berrow & Nicolas Shake

For FOG 2026, Megan Mulrooney will show new works by Los Angeles-based artist Nicolas Shake and UK-based ceramicist Alma Berrow.

Working across canvas and ceramics, both artists explore the tension between personal expression and collective ritual. Within the context of San Francisco - long a crucible for counterculture, experimental design, and alternative modes of living - the pairing takes on a particular resonance. Their works reflect the region’s history of surf, punk, skate, and hippie movements while conversing with the Bay Area’s legacy of spiritual seeking, political rebellion, and aesthetic innovation.

Nicolas Shake’s canvases channel California’s layered subcultures while setting them against the aerospace, automobile, and consumer industries that have equally defined the region. To create each work, Shake lays dyed canvas out in the Mojave Desert, places letter stencils on top, and allows the sun, precipitation, wind, and dust to bleach and alter the surface over the course of several months. Working with experimental dye techniques tied to the countercultural ethos of the 1960s and ’70s, Shakes tie-dyed abstractions are interrupted by the rhythmic repetition of single words, a gesture rooted in Bay area concrete poetry.

In dialogue, Alma Berrow presents seven oversized ceramic ashtrays, each devoted to one of the seven deadly sins. Monumental yet playful, her sculptures transform symbols of casual vice into devotional objects, melding the sacred and the profane. Through their exaggerated scale, the works become monuments to indulgence, ritual, and moral ambiguity.

Together, Shake and Berrow create a layered exploration of desire, rebellion, and consumption, situating personal mythologies within broader systems of meaning. By pairing Shake’s vibrant canvases with Berrow’s irreverent ceramics, the presentation captures the contradictions that define West Coast culture.